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Month / April 2017

So this episode was where we got to find out the answer to the question the Kings have perhaps unwittingly posed: Is it easier to write a great ten-episode season than a great twenty-two-episode season? Or, more specifically, would having a ten-episode season enable the Kings to write a flawlessly brilliant season, as they often implied it would? For background, the Kings, bless their hearts, sometimes responded to implied criticisms of The Good Wife‘s more uneven moments with the defense that cable television shows have it so durn easy with only ten episodes a year. So now that the first season of The Good Fight is over, we can see if their theory panned out!

We missed this when it first came out a couple weeks ago: Brian Edwards penned a nuanced exploration of Homeland‘s attempts this season to interrogate and perhaps undo the Orientalism it hath already wrought, and the “double bind” it faces by still needing to play on our suspense and anxieties. Very worth reading. (at the LA Review of Books)

The SCP Foundation just wrapped its contest for writing SCP-3000. If you haven’t come across the Foundation before in your Internet itinerations, you can think of it as a collaboratively-written X-Files—the contest is a particularly interesting way to see how something like that comes together.

Previously.tv summarizes season 1 of ER in one headline per episode. There are many gems, but my favorite is “Oh My God We Get It Jen And Mark Like To Fuck (Not That The Interminable “Ma Benton Needs To Go In A Home” Arc That Starts Here Is Much Of An Improvement).”

When Bjork blurbs a book using fully 8 exclamation points (“A true pioneer!!!!!!!!”), that’s probably all the motivation you need to read it. But I’m going to add my two cents: this Earth Day, you should read Oddny Eir’s slim, inventive feminist-environmentalist hybrid novel/journal/essay collection, Land of Love and Ruins.

“Men Recommend David Foster Wallace To Me” (its title clearly a nod to Rebecca Solnit’s seminal “Men Explain Things to Me“) speaks what is in all of our hearts. At twenty-three, I thought I was the only woman to have figured out that you NEVER go on an OKcupid date with a guy who mentions David Foster Wallace in his profile. As it turns out, every literarily-inclined woman discovers this sooner or later. Janes and I call it “Bernie syndrome”: the thing itself may be great, but its fans SUUUUCK. (via Electric Literature)

The Atlantic enumerated the failures of the Girls finale, and we agree with 80% of it. (Review to come)

[HOMELAND SPOILERS] Rupert Friend agrees with us that Quinn’s suffering had started to feel sadistic and that this was the right time for The Thing That Happened to happen. He also essentially says the exact same thing I’ve been arguing all along about Quinn: “He takes responsibility and has a moral code. And I’m not sure that Carrie does.” (via EW — and 17 bajillion bonus points to Rupert, by the way, for graciously but firmly correcting EW when they referred to an adult sexually abusing a child as a “sexual relationship.”)